#421 Marketing Minute: How to Market Your Book Using 5-Step Marketing Plan

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

What are some tips to market your book? My name is Shelley Hitz. I'm the owner and founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com Honestly, this is a question I get all the time. There are so many ways to market a book like a thousand and one probably. We have so many tools for you Inside Christian Book Academy. You can get everything for one price. You're just going to pay a monthly or a yearly membership fee. Or you can get them@thebookmarketingshop.com but what I typically recommend is thinking about marketing in a five step marketing plan. So when you think about it in this way, then you'll be able to determine maybe where are your where you know, which steps are you missing? Where do you want to put more energy? And the first step is to attract. Attracting is when you're attracting new readers, people that haven't heard of you yet. It's not your neighbors, your friends, your family, your social media followers. These are people that are brand new to you. And typically this is the step that a lot of us will. I guess I was trying to sugarcoat it, but a lot of us neglect and we need to put more time into this step. We try all the other marketing techniques and then we're like, it's not working. It's not working. But what you might be missing is this first step of each of attract. And the three main ways that you attract new readers to what you're doing is first of all SEO search engine optimization. This can be through your blog post. It can be through YouTube. People, people use YouTube as a search engine. They're typing in their phrase Pinterest. Amazon is even a search engine. So a lot of times I'll recommend publishing a short Kindle ebook with specific search terms in it that people are looking for that relate to your main book and use that as a way to attract new people. But SEO, search engine optimization, that's one way to attract new readers. The second way is ads. The main way for authors is Amazon ads. And Amazon ads have worked really well for us over the years. But it does take time and energy to learn. Just like anything else, right? You do need to monitor them and make sure that you tweak it. You turn things on and off, depending on how much money is getting spent and how many sales you're making. But that can be a great way. There's also bookbub ads, there's other paid ads, and I go into depth on this in Christian Book Academy. And then so you have SEO paid ads, and then you have collaborations. This is where you do, like, guest interviews on podcasts or guest blogging, or you get featured as a speaker at someone's event or their summit or conference. There are so many ways to do collaborations, and some of them don't require speaking. We have a training in Christian Book Academy called Solo email Swaps. In fact, we have an entire module called Courageous Writer, all about collaborations. I call it Courageous Writer because it does require a lot of courage to do collaborations. But we have so many ideas for you in there. But solo email swaps are for those of you that already have an email list, and you have, I would say, at least 50 to 100 subscribers. And then you can begin reaching out to other authors or other people in your field or your niche, and you can share their book with your audience, and they can share yours with theirs. And there's so many ways to do this. And so that's just one way. And I, like I said, I cover tons and tons of ways to do collaborations in that module for, for you. And then that's attract. So that's where you're going to find new people for your books, through SEO, through ads, through collaborations. And there may be some other ways, too, but that's typically going to be the new ways. Another way is just word of mouth, of people just talking about your book and sharing it and spreading it. And because they're so excited about it, they're so delighted about it. And so definitely referrals and word of mouth is in there as well. The second step is to engage. And this is where I recommend that every author set up a email subscription service. So you create a compelling gift related to your book, and then you ask people to enter their name and email address to get that gift. And so it can be many different things. It doesn't have to be the typical PDF that download, but like our Kingdom Writers Conference, we offer it for free to sign up, but the way you pay for that is with your name and email address. So you sign up to our email address to get access to our different events. So, you know, some people have webinars that they host, but it could be as simple as a PDF. It could be an audio or a video that you create. There are so many Ways to, to create great gifts, whether you're fiction, nonfiction, children's book, author, whatever kind of book you've written. And again, we have a lesson all on this with tons of ideas. I did a ton of research on this for you, and it's in Christian Book Academy. First step is attract, finding those new people. And this is the step that's often missing for most authors. Marketing plan. Second is to engage. Typically for us, it's going to be asking someone to sign up for our email list. Number three is to nurture. Now, this is the step I think most people spend so much of their time is blogging, podcasting, you know, creating YouTube videos, social media content, emailing an email subscription list regularly. This is the content that most of us think about when we think about marketing, right? You think about, oh, I got a blog or I've got to post on social media, or I've got to do this or that. But that's really what would be considered nurture content. And that's for people who have already known about you. They're in your audience, they're following you in some way, and now you're nurturing them so that they can grow to know, like, and trust you. That is marketing. It's building a relationship. It's not being a sleazy used car salesman with your bullhorn on the side of the road. It's building a relationship. And selling is helping. It's serving someone else. It's providing something that they want or need, whether it's entertain through fiction or they're learning something new through nonfiction, or maybe a devotional that they get inspired and draw closer to God or personal growth. So you're doing something that's helping someone and building a relationship with them through this nurture content. Now, you don't have to go overboard on this. I see so many people just doing way, way, way too much of this and not enough of the attract right.

Now. If, if you're in that cycle, my challenge to you is to back off a little bit on some of the nurture. And I'll do something, do something to nurture. For me, I do a weekly podcast episode and I'm keeping them short. They're like 10 to 15 minutes usually. And then once a week, I send out an email to my email subscriber list and it includes a link to that podcast. But some also some inspirational content doesn't. You don't have to go overboard. It can even be once a month that you send something.

Attract is stage number one where you're Finding new readers. Stage two is to engage. And that's typically where you're asking them to sign up for your email subscriber service. Number three is to nurture. That's where you're creating nurture content like a blog or podcast or sending an email. And number four is to offer. This is where you ask someone to buy your book. Now, I know my audience pretty well. We've been working with you since 2010, and so I know that many of you have a hard time asking for the sale, and it feels icky or slimy or gross. But like I said, selling is helping. Selling is serving. If you believe in the message of your book and that it can help someone, it can change their life, it can brighten their afternoon as they read your novella or help their child through your children's book, whatever it is, learn a new recipe through your cookbook, then you know, you have to really believe in your book and the message of your book in order to want to promote it and market it. But you need to ask and you need to offer that. So this is often what we call a call to action. So in all of your content, whether it's a blog post for SEO or it's an ad, or it is collaborations, you're going to want to include a call to action for them to take an action. So that could be to join your email list, it could be to purchase your book, it could be to do something. But there, there needs to be a call to action. And so, you know, occasionally you need to ask your email subscribers and your social media followers and the people that you know that you see day to day and invite them and ask them if they are interested in your book. And you know, what, if they say no, it's okay.

But I have found so often, you know, like, I've had, I had an author say, well, I send an email every week. And I'm like, well, do you, do you ever have a make offer email? So that's what I call it. And we have templates and things for you inside Christian Book Academy to help you with this. But did you have a make offer? Do you ever send a make offer email where you're actually just talking about your book, the benefits of the book and inviting them to purchase it? And she's like, well.

You know, I just kind of, you know, sneak it in there every once in a while and I have a link in the midst of another, you know, other content. So I said, you know, try it, see if, see what happens. And she did. And Guess what? She got some book sales. So that fourth step is invite. And it's a step that often I see my audience at least of authors skipping as well. And then finally the fifth step is to delight. This is where you want to make your book so good and the content so good that it delights your reader that they want to find out what other books do you have, what other products do you have? They want to share your book on social media, they want to share it with their friends. Hey, have you heard of this book? And I was just telling my husband today, I think that's how my book broken crayons still color. I think it's just spread a lot by word of mouth. Now we do sell a lot of copies from ads, but I was recently checking into ads and I'm like we're really not spending that much on ads for the amount of books that are being sold for that particular book. And so I think a lot of it has ended up happening through word of mouth. And so when you delight your reader and you over deliver or you help them to get a result or you really entertain them with your book, they're going to want to share with other people. And that takes us back, back right to step one of attracting. And one of the attract methods I mentioned was referrals. So I hope this was helpful. It just gives you a framework to put the things in and then you can have your business meetings with God. I recommend once a week asking him for strategy, for wisdom and then you can get the practical step by step training from us inside ChristianBookAcademy.com It's a really super low price for the membership. You can either choose to do month to month for monthly, there's no long term contracts or join us yearly. And if you want just to try out a training, we have most of our trainings available@bookmarketing shop.com but you just need to get started. Pick something from the attract step and start growing your audience, start getting in front of new people and ultimately leave the results to God. But it does take time, takes effort and it's worth it. It is so worth it because there are people right now waiting for your book, waiting for the message your book contains and God is able to use it to impact lives. I hope this was helpful and I'll talk to you next time.

Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you as a Christian writer have a specific role to play in the kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this. We choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.